Memory champion Ed Cooke tells Andrew Marszal his tips on how to succeed at
exam revision without resorting to cramming.

In just four months time, summer exams, including life-defining GCSE and A-levels, will be under way. For a generation of students used to updating their Facebook status every four minutes, four months may sound a reassuringly long time away. But add up everything you’ll need to do between now and then – from rereading (or just reading) Of Mice and Men to perfecting your irregular French verb conjugations – and suddenly leaving revision until Easter doesn’t seem so sensible.

So Ed Cooke, a 31-year-old British “memory champion”, seems an appropriate person to ask for guidance. How and when should you begin trying to learn such a daunting mountain of material?

The key, he says, is to start early but learn in short bursts, testing yourself on a subject over several weeks and leaving lengthy intervals between each session. The last thing you should do is start cramming.

“Let’s say on day one of the holidays you learn a bunch of stuff,” Cooke says. “You could just cram, cram, cram, move on to the next thing and cram, cram, cram. But you’ll basically have to relearn it all again the night before the exam because you’ll have forgotten everything. The best thing to do is break up your studying of a subject – read it for 10 minutes, test yourself an hour later, then again on day two, then day seven and day 14. The biggest mistake you can make is just to keep reading it over and over to yourself.”

Cooke’s dislike of cramming is surprising for someone officially entitled to call himself a Grand Master of Memory, an accolade that requires being able to memorise the order of a shuffled deck of cards in just two minutes.

But what Cooke is talking about, he explains, is known in cognitive science as the difference between massed learning – when you learn and consolidate material in a short space of time – and spaced learning.

“People who do massed learning will guess that they’ve learnt better than they have – it’s over-confidence,” he says. “If you drill a load of new vocabulary and then test yourself straight away, you’ll have the impression the memory is going to be there for ever.”

This makes it dangerous for exam revision. Although packing in all your physics revision before Pancake Day might make you feel smug, it’s probably not a good idea. “I can memorise a shuffled pack of cards, but if I don’t test myself on them a few days later, I’ll have forgotten them entirely,” says Cooke.

Of course, testing is little use if you can’t learn the facts in the first place – an accomplishment often easier said than done, particularly if you were never taught to in a meaningful way. But in common with the savant Daniel Tammet (who has recited Pi from memory to 22,514 digits), Cooke is adamant that the capacity to learn huge amounts of information does not require any natural ability – just technique, and a healthy dose of motivation.

“If a fact means nothing to you, you won’t remember it,” he says. “So when you’re first learning something, it’s important to relate what you’re learning to things you already know. Memories are about connections with other things in your mind – you can’t just put a memory into nowhere. It has to connect with your other memories, and that’s a very personal thing.”

It’s for this reason, he says, that it is much easier to remember a funny anecdote about a friend than the sequence of the electromagnetic spectrum – you already have a rich network of memories with which to connect the former. Even so, it is always possible to come up with a rhyme or acronym to remember even the most foreign piece of information. For Cooke this usually seems to take the form of a pun.

“Let’s say you know nothing about art, and you’re trying to learn that this painting is a Caravaggio. You might think, 'Oh, that might be a caravan.’ Then you’d look at the Caravaggio and think, 'That’s how I imagine the world would look through the windscreen of a caravan.’ Or, if you’re doing history and you’re trying to remember the date 1456, well that’s four minutes to three [o’clock]… So there’s this general process that works even if you’re completely ignorant.”

It might sound fatuous, but the results are impressive. Cooke and the neuroscientist Greg Dentre recently put these ideas into practice with Memrise, an online learning platform they created that teaches everything from intermediate Icelandic to flags of the world using similarly abstract-sounding mnemonics. For example, to learn the Italian verb “to go” (andare) it suggests you remember the question: “And are you going to go?” Memrise currently has more than half a million users.

“There are big gains to be made applying these ideas yourself,” says Cooke. “Yes, everyone has their own method, and it’s important to go with what works for you, but the problem is that people are very bad at knowing what works.”

Of course, GCSEs and A-levels aren’t simply memory tests. The trick, even during a timed essay, is to be able to recall the relevant facts, rather than simply splurging everything you know, with little or no prompting. That calls for a broader understanding than endless individual, rote-learnt facts.

“One good technique is, at the end of a revision session, to force yourself to write down everything you know about the subject on a blank piece of paper,” says Cooke. “That way, rather than testing yourself on individual bits, you’ll test yourself on the whole, and it forms in your mind as a narrative. When you compare what you have with your notes, you’ll also notice the gaps, and be like 'Oh, I completely forgot that Japan was in the Second World War. Whoops.’ ”

Doing test essays, even if you just write essay plans, can also help with building stable narratives: “You don’t have actually to write the essays, but it makes you go through all your facts and practise recalling the relevant ones. Going through it in your mind only, it’s possible to delude yourself substantially.”

Sadly though, no memory technique works without focus and discipline, traits that, unfairly or otherwise, teenagers who have grown up with the distractions of technology and social media are rarely celebrated for.

“It’s tricky to spend 45 minutes without texting your friends or what have you,” says Cooke. “Often the reason you can’t concentrate is because you feel that the world is going on around you, and somehow you’re missing out.”

One way around this is to use the “Pomodoro technique”, invented by another former philosophy student. Studying in Italy in the Eighties and unable to concentrate, Francesco Cirillo began using a kitchen timer to structure his work – 35 minutes of work, broken by five-minute intervals to do as he pleased.

Cirillo’s technique is named after this timer, which was shaped like a tomato (pomodoro in Italian). Easily remembered, Cooke helpfully suggests, by picturing “a Pomeranian eating a tomato”. You wouldn’t bet on him forgetting that.